Both picks support science, doubt its conclusions.

In January, the Trump transition team arranged for two
scientists to meet with Trump. Since then, both have been considered
frontrunners to become the new presidential science advisor, a position
that typically heads the Office of Science and Technology Policy. While
the two—Princeton's William Happer and Yale's David Gelernter—have
radically different backgrounds, they have a couple of things in common:
strong support for science in general and extreme skepticism of climate
science in particular.

There's no indication that Trump will name a science advisor
in the near future, especially as his national security team is in
turmoil. But Happer, a retired physicist, has put himself in the news by
granting interviews in which he calls climate science a cult. So it
seems like an appropriate time to take a good look at both of the
candidates.

William Happer

Happer's biggest research achievement came in the development of
technology that provided Earth-based telescopes with adaptive optics
that allow them to compensate for the distortions introduced by the
atmosphere. He also has a long history of involvement with the
government, having served on a panel of physicists that advised the US
on military issues and serving in the Department of Energy.

In recent years, he has made climate change his primary cause, staking out a position that's in stark disagreement
with the conclusions of those who actually study the climate. He has
held positions at think tanks opposed to climate action, like the Global
Warming Policy Foundation and the George C. Marshall Institute, and is a
regular at the meetings of the Heartland Institute. In an exposé,
Greenpeace found that he was willing to write material
on the benefits of carbon dioxide for foreign fossil fuel companies in
return for donations to a climate lobby group he helps to direct, the
CO2 Coalition (he has also taken money from a coal company for testimony
to state legislators).

All of which would seem to make Happer a potential disaster as
science advisor. But the interviews make it clear that, in general,
he'll be a strong advocate. For one thing, he clearly sees the value of
long-term investments in science. "In the case of fusion, it doesn’t
even work—not yet," he told Pro Publica.
"Nobody’s going to fund things like that in the private sector. It’s
very long-range research, and if the government isn’t willing to do it,
nobody will do it."

William Happer.

In
fact, he even supports long-term climate monitoring. "One of our
problems in climate is that you need long-term good science—for example
long-term temperature records, long-term records of CO2, and it’s very
hard for the government to support that kind of stuff," he said in the
same interview. But he went on to argue that the monitoring networks
needed to be protected from governments' tendency to pump funding into
flashier projects.
But when it comes to the conclusions that scientists have drawn from
that monitoring, Happer maintained his implacable opposition. He
suggested we could double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere
and not see the temperature budge much and that the planet's history
supports this conclusion (it doesn't). He continued to say that warmth
and carbon dioxide would give agriculture a big boost (field studies
suggest otherwise): "I see the CO2 as good, you know," he said. "Let me
be clear: I don’t think it’s a problem at all, I think it’s a good
thing."
And he punctuated those contentions with a combination of conspiracy
theorizing and trolling. We only hear about negative impacts, he told
Pro Publica, because "[alarmists] hijacked all the major scientific
societies." The Scientist was told
that funding would be cut for anyone who produced a contrary result:
"If you were to come up with your computer modeling, with results that
indicated that increasing CO2 really doesn’t have very much effect on
the climate, you would not be renewed. It’s very clear you would not be
renewed." Speaking with The Guardian, Happer echoed tabloid-worthy suggestions that scientists were manipulating climate data.
"They were fiddling with the temperature records to make the [warming] hiatus go away,” he said.
And then there's the trolling. Happer called climate science a "cult" during The Scientist's
interview, but he was only warming up. By his next interview, he was
ready to elaborate. “There’s a whole area of climate so-called science
that is really more like a cult,” Happer told the Guardian. “It’s like
Hare Krishna or something like that. They’re glassy-eyed and they chant.
It will potentially harm the image of all science.”
So while Happer's support for long-term investments in science is
commendable, it's also clear that he's willing to selectively reject
certain conclusions for apparently nonscientific reasons. When those
disagreements take place, he's happy to resort to personal insults
rather than keep the dispute intellectual. As such, he seems like a
questionable candidate to represent the full scientific community.

David Gelernter

If Happer has a long history of getting involved in science policy,
David Gelernter's record on scientific matters is more sparse. But his
history in the public eye is equally long. Gelernter was one of the
victims of the Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski), being severely injured in a
bomb blast during Kaczynski's anti-intellectual campaign. Oddly,
Gelernter later wrote a book that was also anti-intellectual, with the
subtitle How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture. TheWashington Postsaid that in
the book, Gelernter "blamed intellectualism for the disintegration of
patriotism and traditional family values." He also blamed the presence
of Jews in higher education.

David Gelernter.

Getty Images

(Notably, Gelernter is Jewish and has a faculty position at Yale.)

The book also highlights an issue Gelernter shares with
Happer: climate change. In it, he echoes a common charge: that
scientists only started using the term "climate change" once the science
stopped supporting their claims. "[Obama] believes that manmade climate
change is a fact, and he reared crushing new tax proposals on this rock
solid belief, oblivious to the gathering scientific doubts that have
forced ecofundamentalists to stop talking about 'global warming' and
switch to 'climate change.'" Even a cursory check, however, would show
that the two have been used interchangeably for decades.

In an interview with The Scientist,
Gelernter elaborated a bit on climate science. He cautioned that he
only had a layman's understanding of it, and he then went on to make
arguments consistent with that assessment. Climate change is unlikely,
he posited, because the Earth is very big and humanity isn't. He also
seemed unaware that the idea of climate change stretches back over a
century, as he stated, "The idea that human beings are changing the
climate is a radical hypothesis." As far as he's concerned, the evidence
for climate change simply isn't there.
But again, his issue isn't with science in general. In government,
he'd likely be a strong advocate for research, saying, "I’d love to see
more federal funding for science. I don’t think there are any dollars
the country has ever spent that it’s gotten more out of than the dollars
it spent on research." He's also aware of the importance of the
international community of scientists. "It’s a matter of public record
that without both immigrants and foreigners in the system we couldn’t
keep the science world together in the United States," he said in
response to a question about Trump's border policies. "We need these
people. I don’t think there’s the slightest doubt that we’ll continue to
get them."
So while a computer scientist doesn't engage in "research" as a
biologist or physicist would understand it, it's clear that Gelernter
values the scientific endeavor as a whole. And he has indicated he's
willing to put in the work to rise above his layman's understanding of
climate change should he be put in a position that requires it,
something that appears to differentiate him from Happer. But he also
seems to share Happer's willingness to engage in some flamboyant
rhetoric when it comes to his intellectual opponents, which might make
it difficult for him to represent the scientific community as a whole.